The Secret Traditions of the Shinobi and In Search of the Ninja author Antony Cummins is here to clear the air regarding the mysterious assassins known as the ninjas. Were there ninja clans? Did they actually use those masks and funny shoes? Are there any practitioners of real ninjutsu today? Learn all this and more on this episode of the DisinfoCast.

Apparently people are fed up with the challenges of stopping or at least slowing the global warming trend. Sam Masters reports that worldwide concerns about climate change have dropped dramatically since 2009,…

Atlantic Cities describes the 8-bit-style smartphone game RIOT, a thought-provoking attempt to capture the liminal state which occurs during uprisings when order breaks down. I’d rather have my kids playing this than a game which makes them Navy SEALs:

“Riot” is a developing project in Italy that’s led by film-and-game director Leonard Menchiari, who previously did cinematography for “Half-Life” creator Valve Corporation. The atmospheric little simulator of bedlam, which runs on iOS or Android phones, is inspired by real-life political turmoil from around the globe.

There’s a hefty element of strategy involved, with the player taking on either the role of the agitators or the truncheoned legions of police trying to maintain order.

The developers have received modest funding so far on their Indiegogo page. If they collect enough cash, they hope to enrich the simulator by traveling to the sites of recent uprisings in Greece, Egypt and Italy to interview people involved in the conflicts.

Last Spring, the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org) profiled a group of websites as “woman-hating.” Among these were some popular spaces for “the men’s rights movement,” including avoiceformen.com, the-spearhead.com, mensactivism.org and the men’s rights subreddit. On January 21st 2013…

The Center for Land Use Interpretation on symbols strewn across the American landscape which make sense only to airborne machines: There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA, curious…

Loophole For All is a move of extremely questionable legality but unquestionable inspiration from Paolo Cirio. The press release and introductory video explain:

Paolo Cirio, contemporary artist and pirate, hacked the governmental servers of the Cayman Islands and stole a list of all the companies incorporated in the country. Now on Loophole4All.com, he is selling the identities of those companies at a low cost to democratize the privileges of offshore businesses.

Paolo hijacks the identities by moving their addresses to his Caymans mailbox and issuing counterfeited certificates of incorporation from the Caymans company registry. This massive corporate identity theft benefits from the anonymous nature of those companies since the real owners’ secrecy allows anybody to impersonate them.

Through Loophole4All.com, anyone can hijack a Caymans company, from 99¢ for a certificate of incorporation for a real company to $49 for a mailbox in the offshore country with mail rerouting.

“Let none who are ignorant of geometry enter here”, read the entrance to the platonic lodges of old. Putting the ratio back in rationality in this interview, is none other than 32nd degree Freemason and independent scholar Randall Carlson.

As a professional designer, builder and student of Sacred Geometry and long time Freemason, Randall Carlson is uniquely qualified to interpret the hidden meaning of the great masterpieces of mystical architecture. It is his aspiration to affect a revival of lost knowledge towards the goal of creating the new world based upon universal principles of harmony, freedom, and spiritual evolution. Randall emphasizes the cyclical nature of time and the periodic catastrophes responsible for the collective amnesia of our species.

Though potentially alarmist, this documentary points to a process that really started with the advent of the american education system as a part of the rise of industry. Our modern school system, though it has been vastly successful compared to many earlier systems as bad as it is, is indeed based on the whistle-blowing, mechanized and behaviorist perspective of humanity that was popular in the 1920s-50s.

Instead of changing with the times in terms of making kids into machines, and to produce “good workers,” we might consider trying to help create human beings. Because of all the school shootings, in many ways now we are facing a PKD style “thought police” No Tolerance rule toward what someone might do. How does this lack of trust effect the people within the system?

Anaïs Nin was an American born to Hispanic/Cuban parents in France on February 21, 1903. Although we associate the author with Paris, she spent most of her life living in the U.S.

A writer of essays, short stories and novels, Nin’s literary triumph was the publication of her diaries which chronicled more than six decades of experiences. Nin carried on a famous affair with author Henry Miller and it was during her time with him that the pair both started writing erotica to make ends meet. In the Paris of the 1930’s, enterprising publishers cultivated collectors of forbidden writing and paid authors well and quickly for custom-crafted smut. Nin was a pioneer as one of the first women to ply the dirty book trade and she eventually let the works be collected and published widely under the titles Delta of Venus and Little Birds. She’s considered to be among the best writers of the female sexual experience.

Along with Miller, Nin became a counterculture hero during the unrest of the 1960’s. While Miller championed freedom of libido in his writing and fought for free of speech in his battles against censorship, Nin was perceived as the kind of strong, talented, liberated woman that the just-budding feminist movement was still trying to articulate. While she became a popular lecturer at universities, Nin never became involved in radical politics. It seemed she was always a lover more than a fighter. Nin died of cancer in 1977.

Here is the woman herself as she appeared in Kenneth Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in 1954